Catenaa, Saturday, March 01, 2025- Crypto industry losses soared to $1.53 billion in February, marking a 20-fold increase from January, according to Immunefi’s latest report. The sharp rise was primarily driven by the record-breaking $1.46 billion hack of the Bybit exchange. February’s losses represent an 18-fold increase compared to February 2024, when losses were just $81.6 million.
The total losses for the year-to-date now stand at $1.6 billion, up eight times from the same period in 2024. Aside from the Bybit hack, which alone accounted for most of the February losses, other incidents involved smaller-scale DeFi hacks across various platforms, including Infini, zkLend, and Ionic Money.
The hack at Bybit far surpasses previous large-scale breaches, including the Coincheck hack of 2018 ($534 million) and Mt. Gox’s 2014 breach ($470 million).
Immunefi attributes the Bybit breach to North Korea’s Lazarus Group, linking the exploit to malicious JavaScript code served from a compromised AWS S3 bucket outside Bybit’s infrastructure.
In February, BNB Chain and Ethereum were the most targeted networks, suffering four attacks each and contributing to nearly 73% of the losses. The report also noted no fraud cases in the month.
Despite the increased threats, Immunefi continues to offer bug bounty services, having paid out over $112 million to ethical hackers. The platform operates the largest blockchain security community, with over 45,000 researchers.
